A Multistrain Bacterial Diffusion Model for Link Prediction

Topological link prediction is the task of assessing the likelihood of new future links based on topological properties of entities in a network at a given time. In this paper, we introduce a multistrain bacterial diffusion model for link prediction, where the ranking of candidate links is based on the mutual transfer of bacteria strains via physical social contact. The model incorporates parameters like efficiency of the receiver surface, reproduction rate and number of social contacts. The basic idea is that entities continuously infect their neighborhood with their own bacteria strains, and such infections are iteratively propagated on the social network over time. The probability of transmission can be evaluated in terms of strains, reproduction, previous transfer, surface transfer efficiency, number of direct social contacts i.e. neighbors, multiple paths between entities. The value of the mutual strains of infection between a pair of entities is used to rank the potential arcs joining the entity nodes. The proposed multistrain diffusion model and mutual-strain infection ranking technique have been implemented and tested on widely accepted social network data sets. Experiments show that the MSDM-LP and mutual-strain diffusion ranking technique outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for neighbor-based ranking.